How India’s Healthcare Talent Powers Global Mobility Through H-1B Pathways

The world doesn’t have a talent shortage. It has a mobility infrastructure problem. Global healthcare systems, particularly, grapple with unrelenting demand pressures. These include ageing populations in the West, rising chronic diseases everywhere, and chronic staffing shortages that domestic training pipelines simply cannot fill fast enough. Retention challenges compound the issue, leaving hospitals and clinics worldwide scrambling for reliable talent. Yet the pathways designed to bridge this gap, like the H-1B  visa, were architected for tech giants and corporate hiring, not the frontline clinical roles that define healthcare, creating a profound misalignment between supply, demand, and real-world needs.

Healthcare offers the clearest lens on this systemic breakdown. Indian nurses, technologists, physiotherapists, and doctors now bolster hospital and community systems globally, filling irreplaceable gaps. In the US alone, over 32,000 Indian registered nurses represent about 6% of the immigrant nursing workforce, while more than 59,000 Indian doctors make up nearly a fifth of immigrant physicians.

This tension is unsustainable. As dependence on India’s skilled workforce grows, mobility architecture must urgently evolve, prioritising fairness, transparency, and long-term sustainability to balance ethics with opportunity.

Where H1B Helps and Where It Needs Reform

For many specialised healthcare workers, the H1B pathway has become a practical route to international opportunities. It enables skilled professionals to support systems that cannot meet staffing needs on their own. At the same time, the pathway carries structural limits. In fiscal year 2024–25, nearly 400,000 H-1 B petitions were approved, and 16,937 of them, or 4.2%, were for medical and health occupations. Half were for physicians and surgeons. Yet entry still depends on a lottery, employer obligations vary, and protections are inconsistent, leaving some professionals to navigate unclear contracts or relocation processes.

These gaps underline why ethical mobility is now central to workforce planning. When recruitment involves hidden fees, vague commitments or restrictive terms, the process becomes extractive. Healthcare workers take on critical responsibility from the day they arrive and cannot be placed in roles that compromise safety or growth. Ethical mobility ensures transparency, predictable progression and clarity of rights.

The Problem of Devaluing Indian Professionals

The problem isn’t skills—it’s visibility. Global healthcare systems still struggle to recognise the full breadth of Indian clinical capability, leading to systemic undervaluation of their adaptability, multi-role training, and rapid mastery of new protocols.

Indian professionals excel in intensive environments, blending strong clinical grounding with empathy and communication skills that thrive in multicultural settings. They consistently upskill through certifications, reliably filling acute shortages in rural hospitals and community centres, and powering entire service lines.

This misrecognition risks depleting a finite talent pool. Ethical mobility must address it, ensuring fair pathways that value India’s contributions while benefiting both origin and destination countries

The Need to Keep Indian Systems Sustainable Through Circular Mobility

Ethical mobility isn’t protectionist. It’s how you keep systems sustainable. India graduates over 180,000 doctors annually, yet faces uneven distribution and persistent domestic shortages, even as global healthcare demand surges for its talent. Fair, transparent pathways promote circular mobility. This means that professionals gain international experience, skills, and earnings abroad, while open channels enable their return for reinvestment, knowledge transfer, and leadership roles that strengthen India’s own systems in the long run.

AI-based systems can’t fix a broken mobility system, but they accurately reveal where it is broken. By mapping clinical experience, certifications, and training into globally recognised formats, AI ensures transparency in credential verification. It accelerates recruitment timelines from months to weeks, prevents fraud through secure, tamper-proof records, and enhances skills visibility, thereby preventing qualified Indian nurses and doctors from being undervalued or overlooked due to mismatched documentation.

A Better Way Forward for Global Healthcare Mobility

Across the mobility ecosystem, common gaps show where reform is needed. Many experienced nurses and allied professionals find that their capabilities are not fully visible because their records do not match international formats. Employers want ethical recruitment but face slow credential checks and uneven guidance. Workers seek global exposure yet need assurance that their dignity, safety and growth will be protected. These realities point to transparency, reducing uncertainty for everyone.

Clear contracts, structured relocation support and defined career pathways help professionals plan their progression abroad. Standardised skill validation ensures fair assessment across diverse training backgrounds. Recruitment fees should never fall on workers, and their right to move within legal boundaries should remain protected. When these principles are applied, trust builds, and mobility becomes stable for both destination countries and India’s workforce priorities.

Conclusion

India has the potential to become the world’s most trusted source of healthcare talent, not merely because of scale, but because of the depth, adaptability, and resilience of its professionals. Countries such as the United States offer meaningful opportunities for clinical growth, exposure, and contribution in return.

However, this exchange can only remain sustainable if mobility systems evolve.

Healthcare professionals shoulder responsibility for patient lives from the moment they step into a clinical setting. Mobility pathways must reflect that responsibility - offering clarity, fairness, and protection alongside opportunity. Visa frameworks like the H-1B, and global mobility systems more broadly, need to prioritise transparency, skill recognition, and long-term workforce stability.

The world does not need more migrant labour. It needs mobility systems that treat healthcare professionals with the same dignity they extend to their patients every day.

If India helps shape global benchmarks for ethical healthcare mobility, the outcome benefits everyone - healthcare workers, destination systems, and the patients whose care depends on them.

Avinav Nigam, Founder and CEO of TERN Group